Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize-winning writer, was born in suburban Montreal and lived in many places across the globe, cities such as New York and Paris, a summer home in Vermont, and in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died at 89 in 2005. But it was Chicago where he was formed and the city deeply influenced his life and work.
The city also gave literature one of its most famous opening sentences when Bellow wrote in his 1953 novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” “I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
Stunning and telling, no doubt. I wish I could tell you that the latest edition of the long-running PBS series “American Masters” about Bellow is equal to its subject. Premiering Monday at 8 p.m. on WTTW-Ch. 11, “The Adventures of Saul Bellow” has been called by its well-meaning producer Asaf Galay the “first ever major documentary” on the writer.
This hourlong program — and one hour is simply not enough time — is an attempt to detail Bellow’s importance but while all manner of experts and relatives comment on the man and read from his work, it fails to give us anything beyond a thin profile.
Many of his novels go unmentioned, including those fascinating formative works, “Dangling Man” (1944) and “The Victim” (1947). The show offers the requisite shots — think the “L” and cityscapes, some old and some jarringly contemporary — of the Chicago that Bellow first glimpsed at age 9 when he and his Russian Jewish family arrived from Canada and settled in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.
The “adventures” of Saul Bellow were many but in this film we get a smart but dry academic trip rather than the wild roller coaster ride the writer deserves.
As an example, we are shown, superfluously, moments from the Court Theatre’s rehearsals for its 2019 production of “The Adventures of Augie March.” My colleague Chris Jones called the play “a remarkable achievement” and added that “some of the ideas for scenes here are quite dazzlingly creative.” He gave it his highest rating of four stars.
It is a great book, dazzling too, which I found in my early 20s and was so taken that I was compelled to read everything Bellow wrote before and afterward. I understand why British author and critic Martin Amis called it the “great American novel” in this film and why other writers heap praise on Bellow’s way with words.
Most of those in the film are Bellow fans — the late Philip Roth, most powerful among them, though does say, “[Saul] was not a nice fellow.” There are others of less favorable opinion, such as Evanston-born writer and scholar Charles Johnson, who brings up what he feels is a racist scene in the 1982 novel “The Dean’s December.” And author and critic Vivian Gornick addresses the familiar charge of misogyny, with Bellow doing little to silence that, as when he tells Dick Cavett in a TV clip, “I have never turned over a fig leaf that didn’t have a price tag on the other side.”
There is a great deal of Bellow in the film, mostly from bygone interviews. He is mostly smart and thoughtful, if a bit prickly. He was a complicated character, a loyal friend who also mined his friendships for not always flattering material, a legendary womanizer who would marry five times and have four children. We hear from a couple of those wives and a mistress and from his three adult sons.
His widow, Janis Freedman-Bellow, who met Bellow when she was a student of his at the University of Chicago and 40 years his junior, holds the center of the film, allowing the camera into their Vermont summer home, into Bellow’s writing cabin where she says he “would make a whistling noise under his breath as he worked. And he would labor over the sentences … It was magic to see.” Along the roads here they used to ride their bikes and we see into his library “where all of Saul’s books live.” The couple’s daughter, Naomi Rose, born when Bellow was 84, is seen but not heard.
I knew Bellow a bit, primarily because he and my father Herman shared a Humboldt Park childhood and a religion and had many mutual friends. Another reason, surely, was my father’s 1953 review of “Augie March” in the Sun-Times, writing that Augie was “a strange sort of hero … There is no basic pattern to his life. Yet he is a sympathetic character with whom all but the most obtuse can find identification. For Bellow, I believe, intends to make us aware of how much Augie March there is in each of us.” He also predicted that the novel would move “Bellow well into the front rank of our major novelists.”
That was true but does it not now seem that he and his work have fallen out of fashion? When was the last time you heard a friend recommend one of Bellow’s novels?
It is said that Bellow’s last words were “Was I a man or was I a jerk?”
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Perhaps the answer to that lies in his work. It is not to be found in this film.